OpenGeek is speech brought to you by an open minded geek interested in technology and political issues and their combined effect on society. You will also find a few other (hopefully) interesting ramblings mixed in as well. Thank you for reading. Your feedback is welcome --encouraged actually!

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Blogworks! (and some other stuff)

This is kind of a dual post. First, I want to comment about a significant evolution in blogging that's become a factor. I first noticed this with "Blog Against Theoracy". Excellent effort, spearheaded by Blue Gal (and she does appear to rock), this was your usual blogswarm, and was fairly successful. I participated in this and met some very interesting people. Good stuff all around.

Blog Against Theoracy is happening again this holiday weekend, with a topic surrounding the idea that seperation of church and state is patriotic. (it clearly is) I've some stuff to write, so I'll be there with my post along with a lot of others. Again all good.

Doing some digging on blogswarms, I find they are led by a few very active hub blogs. A hub is where significant attention has been cultivated. I've also noted a few that are starting to use mailing lists for notification. Sometimes people don't check back. I strongly suspect these two ideas are either being combined right now, or are about to be, resulting in kind of a subject based topical, recurring network of blogs all posting on topics at regular times.

Call this the Blogwork, and you probably read that here first! If so, please do spread it around. I don't get to coin terms anywhere near as much as I would like! (c'mon people, it's cool! You know it is, and I'm not ashamed.)

The blogwork is going to act like something like a TV network does. From one source, links, supporting information, framing, assets, etc... will be posted on a given subject, with said subject loosely following a more general topical bias. Examples could be, the environment, a political party, theoracy, geek matters, electronic voting, etc...

Instead of just aggragating all the content into a mega portal blog, like Kos, the content will remain distributed with the idea of introducing more people to more blogs, and of course, bloggers to bloggers. I think this is just cool enough to happen.

A blogwork is also significant in that it can resonate with the traditional media news cycle, yet can grab the attention of many people of different ideologies. For example, someone who is not religious could be following the members of a given blogwork that have that same bent, or bias, yet still be engaged in the topic as a whole. Someone who is deeply religious could do the same.

The key here is that the greater message is being heard on a regular basis; therefore, the central source can engage in some general advocacy through framing and focus on the topic at hand. IMHO, this is quite a powerful idea and one that is likely to continue to grow.

One other key thing is that passers by get snagged into the network via the very wide net cast. You here might be reading OpenGeek, and I thank you if you are, and decide to explore the Blog Against Theocracy blogwork more fully, or perhaps just look forward to regular updates.

To maximize this, participants really should preface their posts with an icon, tagline, etc... that differentiates their blogwork content from their ordinary blogging content that would have otherwise have been written for other reasons.

Lastly, this also encourages people to write on a regular basis. I like this too and think it might encourage more blogging that is focused and relevant. At the very least, taking a moment to gather one's thoughts on a regular basis just isn't a bad thing overall.

That's it. Google around a little. I didn't include links this time because I want to you just go look at a forming blogwork that's gonna have some impact. Have others? Do I have it wrong? You know where the comment button is, by all means use it!